The following extract is taken from the chapter,"Persian Letter" in the book,"The Road to Mecca" by the Austrian Jewish convert to Islam, Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss). This is the first part of the excerpt, more soon,in sha Allah (Allah willing):
Such extravagant laments were a far cry indeed from the true,historical picture of those early happenings that had caused a never-healed schism in the world of Islam:the division of the Muslim community into Sunnites, who form the bulk of the Muslim peoples and stand firm on the principle of an elective succession to the Caliphate, and Shiites, who maintain that the prophet designated Ali, his son-in-law, as a rightful heir and successor. In reality, however, the prophet died without nominating any successor, whereupon one of his oldest most faithful companions, Abu Bakr, was elected khalifa by the overwhelming majority of the community. Abu Bakar was succeeded by Umar and the latter by Uthman; and only after Uthman’s death was Ali elected to the caliphate. There was, as I knew well even in my Iranian days, nothing evil or wicked about Ali’s three predecessors. They were undoubtedly the noblest figures of Islamic history after the Prophet, and had for many years been among his intimate Companions; and they were certainly not‘usurpers’, having been elected by the people in the free exercise of the right accorded to them by Islam. It was unwillingness to accept wholeheartedly the results of those popular elections that led to subsequent struggles for power, to Ali’s death, and to the transformation – under the fifth Caliph, Mu’awiyya – of the original, republican form of the Islamic state into a hereditary kingship, and, ultimately, to Husayan’s death at Karbala. Yes, I had known all this before I came to Iran; but here I was struck by the boundless emotion which that old, tragic tale of thirteen centuries ago could still arouse among the Iranian people whenever the names of Ali, Hasan or Husayn were mentioned. I began to wonder; Was it the innate melancholy of the Iranians and their sense of the dramatic that had caused them to embrace the Shia doctrine?-or was it the thragic quality of the latter’s origin that had led to this intense Iranian melancholy?
By degrees, over a number of months, a startling answer took shape in my mind.
When, in the middle of the seventh century, the armies of Caliph Umar conquered the ancient Saasanian Empire, bringing Islam with them, Iran’s Zoroastrian cult had already long been reduced to rigid formalism and was thus unable to oppose effectively the dynamic new idea that had come from Arabia. But at the time when the Arab conquest burst upon it, Iran was passing through a period of social and intellectual ferment which seemed to promise a national regeneration. This hope of an inner, organic revival was shattered by the Arab invasion; and the Iranians, abandoning their own historic line of development, henceforth accommodated themselves to the cultural and ethical concepts that had been brought in from outside.
The advent of Islam represented in Iran,as in so many other countries,a tremendous social advance;it destroyed the old Iranian caste system and brought into being a new community of free,equal people;it opened new channels for cultural energies that had long lain dormant and inarticulate:but with all this, the proud descendants of Darius and Xerxes could never forget that the historical continuity of their national life,the organic connection between their Yesterday and Today, had suddenly been broken. A people whose innermost character had found its expression in the Baroque dualism of the Zand religion and its almost pantheistic worship of the four elements-air, water, fire and earth- was now faced with Islam's austere uncompromisisng monotheism and its passion for the Absolute. The transistion was too sharp and painful to allow to allow the Iranians to subordinate their deeply rooted national consciousness to the supranational concept of Islam. In spite of their speedy and apparently voluntary acceptance of the new religion,they subconciously equated the victory of the Islamic idea with Iran's national defeat; and the feeling of having been defeated and irrevocably torn out of the context of their ancient cultural heritage-a feeling desperately intense for all its vagueness-was destined to corrode their national self-confidence for centuries to come. Unlike so many other nations to whom the acceptance of Islam gave almost immediately a most positive impulse to further cultural development, the Iranians' first-and, in a way,most durable-reaction to it was on of deep humiliation and repressed resentment.
The resntment had to be repressed and smothered in the dark folds of the subconscious,for in the meantime Islam had become Iran's own faith. But in their hatred of the Arabian conquest,the Iranians instictively resorted to what psychoanalysis describes as 'overcompensation';they began to regard the faith brought to them by their Arabian conquerors as something that was exclusively their own. They did it by subtly transforming the rational, unmystical God-consciousness of the Arabs into its very opposite:mystical fanaticism and sombre emotion.
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